Peace and all good! I am Franciscan Friar and a practical social ethicist in the Franciscan tradition. Practical social ethicists seek to apply ethical principles to the concrete needs of society, and Franciscans have been doing this for centuries. I have been teaching at Santa Clara since 2003, and I completed my PhD in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2004. I live at San Damiano Retreat in Danville, where I am the guardian for the friar community. Here is my CV, current as of June 2014. I am no longer able to upate this webpage -- please contact me if you want more current information about my activities!

I have created new courses that link the Catholic imagination with environmental protection activities, and I have taught these in the Environmental Studies Institute and the Department of Religious Studies. Some of the links on the left provide examples of the classroom pedagogies I have created, and further down this page you can find examples of how I have attempted to advance an integral Catholic identity here at SCU.

I am an active participant in the network of Franciscan scholars retrieving our intellectual tradition. My chief contributions have been in the areas of Franciscan environmental ethics and the philosophy of science. I am perhaps best known for coauthoring “Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth.” My recent research has been in the retrieval of a Franciscan political economy, and an integral Franciscan cosmology. I have been a Regent at the Franciscan School of Theology since 2003 (and graduated with an MA from FST in 1996, studying with Bill Short OFM and Joe Chinnici OFM).

My doctoral work investigated how agroecology is extended through social networks, and my primary research activities since then have addressed ethics and values in classical biological control. This practice introduces novel organisms to control invasive pests. It has the greatest possibility of providing sustainable pest control, but has been clouded by ethical concerns, which has made policymaking difficult. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and has taken me to New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, France, Switzerland, and South Africa. You can see in the pictures below a field trip I made with a South Africancolleague, Hildegard Klein, to meet these employees of Working For Water, distributing beneficial insects to control weeds.

This is a picture with two of my dearest friends and Franciscan brothers on the date of my solemn profession as a Franciscan, August 24, 1997. Bill Short is to the left and James Lockman to the right. The ocassion was in St. Boniface Church, in San Francisco, about 10 blocks from where I was born.

I love California native plants, and enjoy gardening with them.This is a picture of a ribes sanguinium I planted at the friary where I lived for 13 wonderful years.

Once upon a time, I was a member of Highway Missionary Society (later known as The Servant Community), a Jesus Movement era intentional community. I planted half a million trees in Washingon, Oregon, California, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado between 1979 and 1984. This is a picture of me planting trees in the Olympic National Forest.

Below you can find a picture of me and the crew near Brookings, Oregon. I was the best dressed treeplanter several years running.

While I was with the Highway Missionaries, I was a lighting technician for Servant, the rock band. You can find some of their music has been re-released. I am the guy on the left, at the sound board. I sing, but not like Bob.